


you love him when you let him go

by hanbrough



Category: Tenet (2020)
Genre: Canon Compliant, M/M, POV Second Person, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-11
Updated: 2020-09-11
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:40:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26400550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hanbrough/pseuds/hanbrough
Summary: The last words you ever hear your soulmate say are written on your wrist, and you never really know who they are until they're gone. In a world where inversion exists, Neil's no longer sure what "the end" even means.or, basically a combination of every canon compliant fic in the protagoneil tag except with a soulmate twist
Relationships: Neil/The Protagonist (Tenet)
Comments: 16
Kudos: 230





	you love him when you let him go

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文-普通话 國語 available: [You Love Him When You Let Him Go](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26575921) by [Issas](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Issas/pseuds/Issas)



> i missed the significance of the red trinket on neil's backpack and didn't realize the implications of the ending until i read about it.....anyways christopher nolan will be tried for his crimes. hopefully this seems in-character and is somewhat interesting!
> 
> 9/21 update: this fic has been translated into mandarin! i've linked it in the notes <3

_ Whose? _

Whose what? It’s such a common, regular, normal word, etched on your wrist—the last word you’ll ever hear spoken from your soulmate. You trace it every night before going to bed, and memorize the way the question mark curls up at the end. You breathe a sigh of relief when people complete their inquiries—Whose dog is that? Whose jacket is sitting in the corner? Whose car are we taking?—but you hadn’t really thought any of them were your soulmate, anyway. 

(Which is fine, because it means you’ll live to see another day.)

Fresh out of college with a master’s degree in physics, you’re sitting in a bar, sipping a cocktail and contemplating your next steps, when a strange man comes up besides you. He orders a Diet Coke, and you raise a brow. “Are you sure you’re in the right place?” You joke. 

“I don’t drink on the job,” he informs you, and you chuckle. “On the job? It’s a Friday night.”

As it turns out, it isn’t just any Friday night: He’s there to recruit you for Tenet, where you learn about time travel—no, not time travel, inversion. You’ve spent countless lectures learning about entropy, and now you have to wrap your head around the concept of reverse entropy. He shows you how to feel the inverted bullet in your hand, and he looks at you with an expression you can’t fully decipher. 

Soon enough, he’s your best friend, and you are his. After a mission, you watch him come out of the hotel bathroom, vanilla-scented body wash still fresh on his skin, and a wave of desire crashes in your chest. You look at him, and he looks at you, and though neither of you say anything, something shifts. 

When he finally kisses you, you think you might be in love. At this point, you know him like the back of your hand; he kisses you, and you kiss him back, and it’s everything.  _ He’s _ everything, and you’re deliriously happy. 

Not much changes after that, only now you hold hands before missions and you have someone to come home to. He doesn’t ask about the word on your wrist and you don’t ask him about his, but you’re fairly certain he’s your soulmate. But when you can invert time and start again, why worry about the last words you might or might not say?

Years pass. He inverts you to save him at the opera house, and although that version of him doesn’t know you, there’s still something familiar in the way he looks at you. But you're in the middle of a gun fight, so you move on, and he lives.

The world is quickly becoming inhabitable: there are talks of inverting the past in order to save the future. It’s time, he says, for the ultimate temporal pincer, and of course you immediately volunteer. But there’s something about the way he can’t meet your eye the night before you’re set to invert, and finally, you can’t stand it. “What?” It comes out harsher than you’d intended.

“You’ll meet me at a different stage in life,” he says instead, draining his glass of water. “You’ll get to know a different me.”

“I already know you,” you say. He knows you know he didn’t answer your question, but just this once, you let it go. 

It’s hard, not being able to tell him the truth. Almost immediately, you slip up; you order him a diet coke, and his ever observant self doesn't miss it. “I prefer soda water,” he says, and you shake your head. “No, you don’t.”

It’s not the same. This version of him doesn’t trust you, doesn’t let you in, and the truth of that stings. But you’d still follow him to the ends of the world, so you end up bungee jumping in Mumbai, crashing a 747 in Oslo, and going on an epic car chase in Tallinn. He pushes you up against the wall after Sator shoots Kat with the inverted bullet, scared and angry and confused, and you wish you could tell him everything. After Ives steps in, he understands it a little bit more, but still not all the way. Though to be fair, you doubt anyone actually understands it all the way.

Back in Freeport, you watch him quietly from a few feet away as he takes his shirt off, examining his injuries. Aside from the latest bruises sustained from Sator and the car crash, his body is still relatively bare compared to the one you know. You itch to touch, to re-familiarize yourself with how he feels under your hands, but there’s no time. And then his arm starts bleeding, but that will have to wait, too, because Kat’s life is on the line, and that’s all he can think about.

Kat believes that her husband intends to die during their vacation in Vietnam, so you invert back to that day. It’s a narrow victory—she shoots Sator earlier than planned, but you manage to drag him and Ives out of there just as the countdown goes to 0. You help him up, and Ives looks at you with a knowing glance.

“You’re really going back in?” he asks you, and it’s a valid question, considering you just barely managed to get out alive the first time. But you’re the best locksmith there is, and there’s nothing you can leave up to chance. You tell him as much, and as you turn to go, he calls your name. “Neil, wait!”

“You never did tell me who recruited you,” he says, and you can’t help but laugh as the truth comes out: it was years ago for you, years from now for him. “We get up to some stuff,” you say, and isn’t that the understatement of the century. Just before you walk away, you add: “This whole operation’s a temporal pincer.” 

“Whose?” His voice is raw, and his eyes are watering. 

_ Whose? _

Slowly, you turn back. All of a sudden, you remember the way he couldn’t look at you the night before the mission. Your wrist is throbbing, and you stop in your tracks as it dawns on you: your end is approaching. He must know it too, by the tone of his voice, even though whatever you say next won’t be your last words to him. 

Whose what? You’ve spent so long wondering what would be at the end of that sentence that you should’ve realized it would be about something as crazy as a temporal pincer. But you didn’t need to hear him say it or see the words etched on his wrist to know the truth—that you’ve been destined to be bound together, right from the start.

You could write poetry about the tragedy of it all. And it's almost even worse, when you've been playing with time for so long a part of you didn't see it coming. But you’ve said it yourself: what’s happened has happened, and you know you have to go back in.

You love him, but your story still ends. He doesn’t love you—yet—but his story is just beginning. 


End file.
